


19. there is always a price

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [146]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-23
Updated: 2016-11-23
Packaged: 2018-09-01 16:43:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8631325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: That’s the Rule, life for a life. But Helena knows what it means. Heart for a heart. Sarah shot her in the chest, and she’s alive now. Only the exact same death could balance that out.





	

Helena wakes up in a hospital bed with her chest aching and aching and a **Rule** in her brain, as solid as gravity.

It goes like this: life for a life. That’s it. That’s the **Rule** , life for a life. But Helena knows what it means. Heart for a heart. Sarah shot her in the chest, and she’s alive now. Only the exact same death could balance that out.

The nurses pin her down and send her back to sleep, but before they can Helena opens her hand. The bullet is nestled in her palm, sweet as a lullaby. Of course it is.

\--

Helena follows Sarah from their mother’s house with a bullet tucked in her boot. She could shoot Sarah any time – the **Rule** is only life-for-a-life, doesn’t say when or why or how. Helena doesn’t want Sarah to die in a back alley, though. Helena doesn’t want Sarah to die at all, but the **Rule** is her spine and the ribs around her heart and she doesn’t know what will happen if those things break. So. She follows Sarah to Rachel’s apartment. She doesn’t have a gun yet, so she should turn around, so she should – but she doesn’t.

She stabs the man that tries to take her death. She stumbles to Sarah in the shower. “Hello, _sestra_ ,” she says, “good to see you.” None of these things are lies, not really. Or maybe they are. It depends on how you look at it.

“I shot you,” Sarah says, “you were dead. You were dead.”

“Yes,” Helena says.

When Sarah is done shouting and crying, and when Helena is done holding her, she cuts Sarah down from the shower and goes into the other room and takes the dead man’s gun. She empties it out of bullets on the floor, ping ping ping. She loads her one bullet in it. It fits perfectly. Of course it does. She clicks it into place.

Sarah, behind her. Helena shoves the gun into her boot. (She misses having pockets.) She turns around. Sarah is standing in the doorframe, eyes bruised, neck soaked in blood. She’s barely standing on her feet. To shoot her now would be something like a mercy.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah says weakly. She opens her mouth, like she’s going to say what she’s sorry for, but she doesn’t say it.

“I’m sorry too,” Helena says. Life for a life. Sorry for sorry. Heart for a heart, Helena’s heart beating sorrowful and lonely against her **Rule** -ribs.

Sarah swallows. “Do you have anywhere to go,” she says.

“No.”

Sarah’s eyes go out into the hallway of Rachel’s apartment, stay there. “Come back with me,” she says, and Helena says: “Okay.”

\--

Sarah steps in front of Helena’s gun and says _you saved my life_ and Helena, idiot – Helena, stupid; Helena, wrong; Helena, **Rule** -breaker – does it again.

\--

Sarah in the sleeping bag across from Helena. Sarah in the car seat next to Helena. Sarah so close Helena could touch her, or kill her. Both of these things are too hard. Both of these things are too easy. In the tent, in the middle of the night, Helena whispers _can I tell you a secret_ but one or both of them falls asleep before Sarah answers.

So she runs. She runs to the bar and she runs to the ranch and her bones hurt and how much longer does she have, how long until the **Rule** breaks and the **Rule** breaks her bones as price? How long does she have? How long?

She goes back. It makes her bones ache less. “I want to see Sarah,” she tells Art, but they won’t let her see Sarah and there is a gun in her bag, next to the tank with her babies in it. Life for lives, now. Scales all uneven. Helena sits in Art’s apartment and asks the **Rule** if she has to take Kira too, now, for the baby inside her, if she has to take something else for the babies in the tank, but the **Rule** won’t answer her. Maybe it knows that Sarah is enough – that Sarah is Helena’s world, her moon, her sun. To Sarah, Helena was barely anything. So. That one Sarah-life is worth Helena’s life, and her child, and her other children. That shouldn’t make Helena so sad.

\--

Lying in the dark, listening to Sarah and Cosima talk about stars. Do it now. Gun with one bullet in it, do it now.

Helena gets up. She puts down the tank. She puts down the gun. She runs into the dark.

\--

 _Stupid girl_ , Pupok hisses in the dark of the prison cell. _You should have done it your way, when you had a choice. Now it’s gonna be hard for you. Nothing is ever easy, kiddo_.

“I know,” Helena says. “I couldn’t do it.”

 _You’re weak_.

“I know,” Helena says.

Pupok is right: the world twists itself to bring Sarah to her. Helena doesn’t have a gun anymore but she digs in the sand of her prison cell and the bullet is there and Helena has always been able to find a gun and Sarah sits in the cell next to her and cries about missing a year with her daughter and Helena can’t Helena can’t Helena can’t Helena can’t Helena _can’t_ —

She throws up in the cell. How long does she have? Will it take her baby too? Will it let her live long enough to name her child and to kiss them on the forehead and apologize? Will Sarah raise Helena’s child for her? Maybe that’s the happiest ending. Maybe Sarah will do a better job than Helena ever could.

 _Or_ , Pupok says, _you can stop being such an_ idiot _and just_ kill her _. Then you can raise that child yourself. Idiot._

“Shut up,” Helena says.

 _Clock’s ticking, kiddo_ , Pupok says. Outside the door buzzes. Five – four – three—

\--

And Helena is out in the world. There’s the handle of a pistol protruding from the pocket of the man she killed. When Helena opens her mouth, the bullet is between her teeth. In the cell: Sarah banging on the window, begging Helena to let her out.

Helena stumbles closer – always stumbling too close to Sarah, like stumbling too close to the sun. She’s leaving Sarah to die, here. She’s leaving Sarah here, and Sarah will die, and it will be her fault. _Please_.

“Now we are even, _sestra_ ,” she says, and hopes more than anything that it’s true. She turns her back on Sarah to run away again into the dark; when she opens her mouth, the bullet falls out. It lands in the dirt. She runs.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


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